Quinn DuPont, a student of cryptography, has created what he's calling Cracking the Agrippa Code: The Challenge, which asks participants to explain how the intentional scrambling of the poem works in exchange for prizes. The first person who successfully cracks the code will win a copy of every William Gibson work ever published — except for Agrippa — along with DuPont's unending gratitude, we suppose.

Part of the challenge will entail decrypting the actual program, the uncompiled source code for which has been long lost. Then, cryptoanalysts will need to figure out how it encrypts the poem — if that's actually what's happening. DuPont admits that the program could just be randomly scrambling the text, in which case there may not be a way to decode it.

If you're interested in reading an unscrambled version of Gibson's Agrippa, you can actually do so on the author's own website. To aid brave cryptography buffs in decoding the program, DuPont has made links available to a copy of the original, along with the Macintosh System 7 emulator required to run it and other tools, on a web page dedicated to the project.